It was nighttime on June 18, 2003, and three helicopters were flying fast and low across Iraq’s western desert. Out of sight far ahead was their quarry, a small convoy of SUVs driving at breakneck speed toward the Syrian border near Al Qaim. In the Task Force 20 operations center on the outskirts of Baghdad, all eyes were on the screen showing footage of the convoy being beamed in real time from a drone. The task force knew the mobile phone numbers being used by the vehicles’ occupants. Those phones’ call patterns led about half Task Force 20’s intelligence analysts to believe Saddam Hussein was in one of the vehicles. That information very quickly made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who got on a secure phone line straight to the JOC. His guidance was clear: “You’re not going to let Saddam drive across the Syrian border.”
Although the task force had been tracking the convoy across Iraq, it was late launching the helicopters from the northern city of Mosul. Now, two DAPs and a Chinook full of Delta operators and Rangers were in hot pursuit. Somewhere ahead of them, the most wanted man in Iraq might be trying to make his escape. In the Chinook were Major Clayton Hutmacher, the air mission commander, and a Delta officer nicknamed “Bricktop,” the ground force commander. The Task Force Brown pilots were pushing the helicopters as fast as they could, but their target had too much of a head start and crossed the Syrian border before the task force birds could catch it.
Rumsfeld ordered the task force to intercept the vehicles in Syria. In the JOC, Delta Lieutenant Colonel John Christian, the new task force commander, relayed the convoy’s latest grid location to Hutmacher and Bricktop. They called back concerned. Although many Saddam loyalists had fled to Syria, from where U.S. officials presumed they were pulling the strings of the nascent Sunni insurgency in Iraq, until now Rumsfeld had sanctioned no missions into Syria, where a U.S. raid could spark a major international incident. “Do you know this grid’s in Syria?” Hutmacher and Bricktop asked. “Yes it is, and you’re authorized,” Christian replied. As the JOC fed the officers on the Chinook new location data for the convoy, their concern only mounted. Bricktop called back again: “Hey, these grids are in Syria.” Christian tried to set his mind at rest. “Bricktop, you’re authorized to pursue.”
With Rumsfeld still on the line, the three helicopters crossed the border.1
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After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, albeit with Saddam himself still at large, Dailey’s instinct was to get his force back to the States as quickly as possible. A senior JSOC officer later characterized the mind-set at the top of the command thus. “We don’t need to be here anymore. The main effort is go back and practice.… The war’s over. There are no weapons of mass destruction.”
But first, JSOC had some unfinished business to which to attend. Abu Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking in 1985, had escaped justice when the Italian government let him go. He had eventually settled in Baghdad. From there, sheltered by Saddam, he had been running the Palestine Liberation Front while still functioning as a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee. With U.S. forces encircling Baghdad, Abu Abbas had made several unsuccessful attempts to flee to Syria. Once Task Force 20 reached Baghdad, finding him became a priority.
On the morning of April 14, U.S. intelligence tracked Abu Abbas to a farm on the western bank of the Tigris on Baghdad’s southern outskirts. From a hangar at Baghdad airport, Task Force 20 quickly planned and launched a classic direct action mission. Rangers from 2nd Battalion’s A Company moved out in a ground convoy and isolated the farm, blocking all possible routes of escape or reinforcement. As two AH-6 gunships covered the ground force, four MH-6 Little Birds deposited Team 6 Gold Team operators who stormed the compound.
They were too late. Abu Abbas had driven off in his black Range Rover minutes previously. The assaulters questioned the people on the objective, seized one of the terrorist leader’s passports and several weapons, and waited in vain for his return, before heading back to the airport after a few hours.
Task Force 20 would not have to wait long for another chance to grab Abu Abbas. By day’s end, intelligence indicated the Palestinian was in east Baghdad’s Fateh Square neighborhood. Again the task force moved out, this time borrowing twenty-four Bradley Fighting Vehicles and four M113 armored personnel carriers from 3rd Infantry Division to transport the Rangers to their blocking positions. Two AH-6 gunships and five MH-6s carrying the assault force dodged wires and other obstacles to arrive simultaneously with the ground convoy. Rangers from 2nd Battalion’s B Company cordoned off the objective. Team 6 operators swept through the target building but found nothing of interest while 1st Battalion’s B Company cleared structures on the opposite side of the street, detaining every man they found. One detainee immediately stood out: a six-foot-tall, 220-pound man with a notably casual demeanor. When the assaulters returned to his comfortable apartment, they found several passports and $35,000 in cash. The task force had its man.2
* * *
Despite Dailey’s wish to take the task force home, the National Command Authority had other plans. Oblivious to the fertile ground the invasion had created for an Islamist insurgency to take root, the Bush administration was focused on destroying all remnants of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party and capturing or killing the leading figures of his regime still at large. Thus, on May 16, Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority, which served as Iraq’s transitional government, issued CPA Order No. 2, disbanding the Iraqi army. As Iraq teetered on the brink of chaos, JSOC’s mission was to go after “the deck of cards”—the top fifty-five members of the Saddam regime, memorialized on an actual deck of playing cards distributed to U.S. forces ahead of the invasion. Within that deck, the task force’s primary focus was the ace of spades: Saddam Hussein himself.3
Task Force 20 set up its JOC at what had been an Iraqi Special Republican Guard base at the capital’s main airport, now renamed Baghdad International Airport (BIAP, pronounced “Bye-App”). The compound badly needed cleaning up before Task Force 20 moved in, which is how it acquired its nickname. Dailey, standing in the airport terminal with some JSOC staff, referred repeatedly to it as “that nasty-ass military area.” A logistician mentioned the phrase in notes that got wide distribution in the task force, and “Camp Nama” was born.4
The deck of cards mission notwithstanding, Dailey still pulled 80 percent of the task force out of Iraq. Delta’s B and C Squadrons went home. A Squadron took their place. The task force’s other principal elements were most of 2nd Ranger Battalion, a small Task Force Brown detachment, and the JOC staff. Delta remained Task Force 20’s central assault force, but there was a shift in command. Blaber returned to the States, to be replaced by John Christian, who commanded the unit’s Combat Support Troop, which contained the heavy breachers and the rest of the unit’s counter-proliferation specialists. Tall and endowed with a deep, booming voice, Christian’s strikingly large head topped with silver hair earned him his Delta nickname: “Buckethead.” His role would be to run the JSOC task force on a day-to-day basis from Nama.5
But A Squadron was not based at the airport, which was too far from central Baghdad, the site of many of its missions. Instead, Delta put its squadron headquarters at a large Ba’ath Party villa in the Green Zone, the chunk of central Baghdad adjacent to the Tigris that the international Coalition walled off to serve as a safe haven for Coalition and Iraqi leaders. The squadron also had a troop in Mosul and smaller elements at BIAP and Tikrit, but for the early stage of the occupation, Delta’s base was at the villa. Named after the unit’s only casualty since September 11, the building was known as Mission Support Site Fernandez and boasted a pool, a gym, and enough space that each team was spread between two bedrooms. Task Force Brown kept aircraft and crews on a stretch of blacktop behind the villa, while the British SAS, known early in the Iraq War as Task Force 14 and later as Task Force Black, moved into the villa next door.6
* * *
Task force operators quickly realized they were missing something vital to any manhunt: actionable intelligence—the sort that could be used to launch a mission immediately. The CIA was unprepared for the nascent insurgency, which senior Bush administration officials were still attributing to Saddam regime “dead-enders.” “There was no intel” when A Squadron arrived, a Delta operator recalled. It became the job of the Delta cell at BIAP to sort through the Agency’s cables and turn them into targets to be divided between Task Force 20, the “white” Special Forces, and the conventional Army. “All the staff officers in JSOC say intel drives operations, right?” said the operator. “It was just the fucking opposite. We had no intel, so operations were driving intel [because of] what we found on these targets. We’d pick on a sweater and we’d pull that string. And sometimes you pull a string on a sweater and it’s nothing and sometimes it unravels, and over time that intel picture starts to develop.”
As Delta began to develop its own source networks, friction grew between the operators and Agency case officers. According to Delta operators, they were far more comfortable than their CIA counterparts with the risk that accompanied low-vis missions in a high-threat environment. Delta acquired a fleet of beat-up local cars to carry them unobtrusively to meetings with sources. The CIA “would go pick up sources we’d been working for a while in three black [Chevy] Suburbans,” an operator said. “The source would turn up dead the next day … [But] if it wasn’t three black Suburbans, they couldn’t do it.”
* * *
On June 11, the Rangers took advantage of what for JSOC was a rare opportunity: a set-piece battle against a large, unsuspecting enemy force. U.S. intelligence had alerted the task force to the presence of a large terrorist training camp near Rawa in Anbar, about thirty miles from the Syrian border. The 101st Airborne Division had been preparing an assault on the position, but intelligence indicated the terrorists were readying a major attack on Coalition forces and the 101st needed more time to plan, so the mission was given to Task Force 20. In less than twenty-four hours, 2nd Ranger Battalion’s B Company and Task Force Brown’s Little Bird guns launched under the cover of darkness.
Two platoons air-assaulted onto the terrorist training camp—Objective Reindeer—located in a deep wadi, while another drove 175 miles from BIAP in ground mobility vehicles along with the battalion mortars to arrive simultaneously with the air assault. Jets dropped six air-burst Joint Direct Attack Munition bombs on the position, but the militants had plenty of fight left in them. Fierce point-blank combat with grenades and automatic weapons ensued. Withering AC-130 and AH-6 gunship fire supported the Rangers. When the dust cleared, eighty-four enemy fighters lay dead. No U.S. soldiers were killed, but one lost his leg to a grenade. The militants also shot down an AH-64 Apache gunship helicopter that arrived with a relief force from the 101st. Rangers rescued its crew. Along with 2,000 RPGs and fifty RPK machine guns, the Rangers found eighty-seven SA-7 surface-to-air missiles at the site. The task force’s victory and the lopsided casualty figures were a testament to the “bilateral” training the Rangers and Task Force Brown conducted routinely.7
A week later, the task force found itself in a race to the Syrian border against the convoy thought to contain Saddam Hussein. The convoy won that race, but with Rumsfeld’s okay, the helicopters crossed the border and chased it down a couple of miles into Syria. In a confusing situation, the heliborne JSOC troops, supported by an AC-130 gunship, interdicted the vehicles but also got into a firefight with Syrian border guards, in which several guards were wounded. Saddam Hussein was not in the convoy, but relatives of his were. “I think they were cousins of his,” said a source who tracked the battle in Task Force 20’s JOC. The task force also conducted an air strike against a group of farmhouses on the Iraqi side of the border, killing at least one person—a pregnant woman—and shot up a Bedouin truck, killing at least two people, according to Patrick Andrade, a photographer embedded with 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was called to deal with the aftermath of the Task Force 20 mission. A Delta source estimated Syrian casualties at between ten and twenty. “As we approached the Syrian border, everyone just figured, ‘We’re on a movement to contact, start firing at everything that moves,’” the Delta source said. Other unconfirmed reports said as many as eighty Syrians died. The task force troops flew the wounded Syrians to a U.S. medical facility in Iraq, where they were treated before being repatriated.
Franks visited Baghdad the next day and reacted with typical bravado after Task Force 20 officials briefed him on the incident. “The Syrians can either make a big deal out of it or a small deal out of it,” he said. “And if they make a big deal out of it, we’ll show them what a big deal is.” Syrian protests were restrained. From the task force’s perspective, “everyone moved on,” said the Delta source. “It was almost a nonevent.”8
* * *
Delta’s A Squadron spent the rest of its tour hunting Saddam. They didn’t find him, but on July 22 they got a chance to take down his sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, who were also still on the run. After being turned away from Syria, they found temporary refuge in Mosul in the home of a sometime supporter of their father. But spooked by the presence in his house of the second- and third-most-wanted men in Iraq (and, perhaps, tempted by the $30 million reward on offer for the pair), their host let Coalition forces know that the brothers were at his home, along with Qusay’s fourteen-year-old son and a bodyguard. Delta delayed the mission until the next day as operators gathered a blocking force from the 101st and tried to visually confirm the targets. On July 23, with the building surrounded in broad daylight, an A Squadron sniper nicknamed “Noodle” killed Qusay with a shot through a window. Then a six-man team from A2 Troop with Ivan, a military working dog, entered via the carport and tried to assault up the stairs. But the brothers’ well-trained bodyguard, in all likelihood a member of the Special Republican Guard, which Qusay led, drove the operators back with AK fire and a grenade, wounding at least two of them. The bodyguard also killed the dog, which had paused to attack Qusay’s corpse. After the operators withdrew, the bodyguard shot and wounded a soldier attached to the 101st company who was standing casually by a Humvee.
Reluctant to attempt another assault, the operators instead asked the 101st to take the building under fire with heavy weapons. OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters from the division’s 2nd Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment fired rockets at the building, while the ground force peppered it with about ten TOW missiles. The barrage worked. When A2 reentered the building, they found Uday and the bodyguard dead. Qusay’s son was still alive—holding a rifle—until an operator shot him. In the operation’s aftermath, task force troops reportedly showed more respect to Ivan’s corpse than they did to the bodies of the two brothers.
Proud of their role in the brothers’ demise, A2’s operators had a group photo taken with the source holding a fake check signed by George W. Bush. The squadron command sergeant major, “Grinch,” had ball caps made for his men embroidered with the aces of hearts and clubs, Uday and Qusay’s respective ranks in the deck of cards.9
Less than a month later, on August 17, the task force captured Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikriti, better known as “Chemical Ali,” a cousin of Saddam responsible for gassing Kurds who rose up against the regime in the 1991 Gulf War’s aftermath. The deck of cards’ king of spades, Ali was the fifth-most-wanted man in Iraq.10 “We had been tracking Chemical Ali’s girlfriend,” said a Delta source. “We had her on sigint, had her on humint, and we found her gathering passports for Chemical Ali and all the rest of his family to go to Syria—fake passports. So we finally picked her up one night and pretty much told her, ‘Hey, you either tell us where he is or you’re going to go away for a long time.’” The woman quickly gave up Tikriti’s location: a tall apartment building “a couple of blocks” from Delta’s squadron in downtown Baghdad. The operators waited until very early morning, then picked or forced the lock on his door and silently entered the apartment. They found Tikriti sound asleep in bed. Using the barrel of his M4 assault rifle, an operator nudged him. Tikriti opened his eyes to see the green glow of several operators’ night vision goggles staring down at him. “He pissed his pants right there in bed,” the Delta source said.
But as the task force worked its way down the list of fifty-five “former regime elements,” a different enemy was setting flame to the kindling provided by an Iraqi population humiliated by a foreign occupation. Two days after Chemical Ali’s capture, a suicide car bomber attacked Baghdad’s Canal Hotel, headquarters of the United Nations effort in Iraq, killing Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. special representative in Iraq, and at least twenty-one others. A similar attack on the hotel on September 22 caused the United Nations to pull out of Iraq altogether. The bombers were sent by a new entrant into the Iraq armed conflict, the Jordanian Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Into the growing anarchy stepped a new JSOC commander. On October 6, Dell Dailey handed off command to Major General Stanley McChrystal in a bland ceremony in a parachute packing facility on JSOC’s compound at Pope Air Force Base.
In light of the events of the next several years, it’s interesting that command of JSOC wasn’t McChrystal’s first wish at that stage of his career. He had hoped to be given the 82nd Airborne Division and wondered aloud about whether he was the right choice to lead JSOC.11 But at forty-nine, McChrystal had already built an impressive résumé that in retrospect made him a perfect candidate to head the organization. His multiple tours in the Rangers, culminating with two years commanding the regiment between 1997 and 1999, combined with almost three years as a staffer in JSOC’s operations directorate (including the 1991 Gulf War), had taught him how JSOC worked; his most recent assignment as the Joint Staff’s vice director of operations had given him an insight into the inner workings at the highest levels of the Pentagon. But as McChrystal was only too aware, one item missing from that résumé was any time spent in the special mission units, many of whose members were, as he admitted, still of the opinion that the JSOC headquarters was as much a hindrance as a help.12
A few days after taking command of JSOC, McChrystal flew to Tampa to meet with General John Abizaid, who had replaced Franks as CENTCOM commander, and General Doug Brown, who’d taken Holland’s place at Special Operations Command. The meeting with Abizaid produced two agreements. McChrystal requested, and Abizaid agreed, that he would deal with McChrystal personally on any issue to do with JSOC forces in the Central Command region, even if a deputy, rather than McChrystal himself, was running the show in Iraq or Afghanistan at the time. Second, McChrystal agreed to Abizaid’s request to conduct a major operation in eastern Afghanistan, where Central Command had reports of the presence of senior Al Qaeda leaders.13
Within three weeks of taking command, McChrystal departed for an orientation tour of JSOC elements in Iraq and Afghanistan.14 The forces he visited were by now stretched thin by the nonstop commitments of the “global war on terror.” When Zarqawi’s terrorist bombing campaign in Iraq took hold in late summer, the Pentagon directed Delta to prepare to assume a security role at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. This threatened to burden the unit, just as the requirement to provide bodyguards for Karzai had hampered Team 6 in Afghanistan, so Delta pushed back hard, telling Rumsfeld he had to choose between having his premier counterterrorist force protecting the embassy or actually fighting terrorists in Iraq.15 The tasking soon went away, but the ongoing commitment to Iraq was straining JSOC, which now had to man task forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as a headquarters and an on-call force in the United States ready to respond to an 0300 counterterrorism or 0400 counter-proliferation mission. “We were tapped out,” a retired special operations officer said, adding that JSOC had to request help from the services’ special operations components—Air Force Special Operations Command, Army Special Operations Command, and Navy Special Warfare Command—to help fill its manpower needs.16
Stunned by the indecisiveness at the highest levels of American command in Iraq, McChrystal focused on problems within his powers to fix. After visiting JSOC’s sixteen-person team in Mosul and a similar cell in Tikrit, he realized his 250-person task force in Iraq was divided into isolated elements with little connectivity to each other and no efficient process for turning potentially valuable documents and digital devices seized on missions into intelligence to be cycled back to the strike elements—the Delta troops and Ranger platoons—to drive more raids. As if to underline the growing threat to U.S. forces, on October 25 an insurgent RPG downed the trail aircraft in the flight of two TF Brown Black Hawks returning McChrystal from Mosul to Baghdad. Because the general had left most of his party in Baghdad, the aircraft was empty except for the crew, all of whom survived.17
During those first months after the fall of Baghdad, JSOC had access to only one Predator, and even that was flown by pilots back in the States. But the senior Delta officers in-country, first Blaber and then Christian, realized they had at least a partial solution to the lack of aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) at their fingertips: the helicopters of the unit’s E Squadron, equipped with the Wescam ball. “We said ‘Let’s get the fucking Wescam ball over here,’ and that was a major breakthrough in Iraq,” recalled a Delta source. E Squadron shifted its main effort to Iraq, deploying its small air force of fixed wing planes, standard Army Black Hawks, and at least one Mi-17, all affixed with the Wescam ball and other top secret sensors. (A standard Black Hawk, without an air-to-air refueling probe that is a 160th Black Hawk’s unique signature, provided a sort of cover in Iraq, as regular Army aviation units were flying so many of them.)
It soon became the norm for an E Squadron Black Hawk with the call sign “Birdseye” to go up for eight hours every night to provide ISR support to the task force’s missions. The helicopters didn’t support daytime missions, as the risk of being seen and compromising missions was too great, but flying at about 8,000 to 10,000 feet, they were invisible at night. “They’d be blacked out,” said a special operations aviator. “You couldn’t even hear them.” The Birdseye pilots would narrate what they were seeing on their video, which they also transmitted in real time to task force vehicles on the ground and back to the JOC. This mission fell to E Squadron for a simple reason: its crews were the only personnel that the operators on the missions trusted to be able to know what tactical information they needed. “It always boiled down to who did Green trust to give them what they wanted,” said the special ops aviator.18
Through fall 2003, the task force stuck assiduously to their assigned mission, hunting “former regime elements,” as around them Iraq descended into bloody tumult. For Delta, the primary focus was Saddam Hussein. By December, A Squadron, now led by Mark Erwin, sensed they were closing in on their quarry. “We were getting a lot of intel,” said an operator. “We had rolled up on our rotation anybody who was even remotely close to Saddam: chicks he liked to bang, their husbands, his butler, his tailor, his inner circle, his cooks. We had gone through all those guys and we knew we were getting close.”
* * *
In November McChrystal moved to Bagram to oversee what became Winter Strike, the operation he’d promised Abizaid. Winter Strike was in some ways the last hurrah of the JRX-style mind-set that held sway under Dailey. “We went there and set up the Taj Mahal,” a JSOC staff officer said. The Afghanistan task force, which had shrunk to about 200 personnel, increased tenfold. But the massive operation was a bust. McChrystal’s forces—Rangers and Team 6 SEALs, mostly—swept through Nuristan and Kunar provinces without snaring any senior enemy leaders. The new JSOC commander quickly realized that this sort of large, laboriously planned operation was not the route to victory.19
Then, with McChrystal back at Pope and nine days after Coultrup’s C Squadron had replaced A Squadron in Iraq, the task force there got its big break when it captured Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Musslit, a trusted Saddam confidant, in Baghdad on December 12. Under intense interrogation, Musslit coughed up the information that the deposed dictator was in the town of Dawr, across the Tigris from his hometown of Tikrit. The next day, C Squadron moved north to Tikrit, bringing Musslit with them.
By this point in the war, JSOC had expanded its command structure to accommodate two full-time, one-star deputy commanders. With three flag officers, JSOC could keep one each in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pope. Rear Admiral Bill McRaven was the deputy commander running JSOC operations in Iraq. He called McChrystal from the BIAP operations center and told him that the task force had actionable intelligence on Saddam’s whereabouts.
That night, based on further information that Musslit had reluctantly divulged, the task force raided an objective consisting of two farms on the river’s east bank. McChrystal and the JSOC headquarters staff watched the operation in real time on a Predator feed displayed on a large screen in the JOC. After seizing two brothers, one of whom was Saddam’s cook, the operators knew they were on to something. Under rigorous questioning at the site, Musslit finally indicated a floor mat outside one of the farmhouses. Moving it aside, the troops discovered Saddam’s hiding place, a tiny six-foot “spider hole.” The bearded, disheveled ex-dictator appeared, looking up at the operators. Through an interpreter, the operators asked his identity. “I am Saddam Hussein, the duly elected president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate,” he answered. “President Bush sends his regards,” a Delta operator shot back.
There was no negotiation to be done. The task force soldiers pulled him out, checked his body for telltale tattoos—dealing roughly with the slightest resistance on his part—and bundled him aboard a Little Bird for a short flight to a Coalition compound in Tikrit.20 The ace of spades was in the bag.
* * *
For the Delta operators, a brief period of relative calm followed Saddam’s capture.21 “We were literally down in Baghdad going to dinner and drinking tea out in the cafés, for about six weeks,” recalled a unit member. But at higher levels in the task force and at JSOC headquarters, there were already suspicions that capturing Saddam, while an important target for political reasons, was not the key to ending the violence in Iraq. As early as October 2003, Scotty Miller, now Delta’s deputy commander, had concluded that the ongoing violence did not represent the death throes of the former regime, but a new, tenacious insurgency.22 It was also soon clear that that insurgency, while rooted in the grievances of Iraq’s Sunni population, was being nourished from abroad. Task force personnel noticed that an increasing number of detainees they pulled off objectives were not Iraqis, but foreign Islamist fighters flowing into Iraq across the Syrian border. By the end of 2003, a JSOC advance force operations task force had established a base in western Iraq in an effort to keep track of this influx.23 As task force intel analysts pored over the available data, one name kept cropping up: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A comer in the world of Islamist terrorism, the thirty-seven-year-old Zarqawi had run a militant training camp in Afghanistan and was now seeking to make a name for himself in Iraq, running a group called Jama’at al-Tawhid al-Jihad (the Organization of Monotheism and Jihad). By fall 2003, Major Wayne Barefoot, Delta’s assistant intelligence officer, had identified Zarqawi as a key enemy figure.24 Before the year was out, he would inform McChrystal of his assessment that not only was Zarqawi in Iraq, but that the Jordanian was constructing an insurgent network in the country.25 McChrystal brought Barefoot with him from Baghdad to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia to brief his findings to CIA director George Tenet.26
In retrospect, the realization that an Islamist insurgency had taken root in Iraq seems like a foregone conclusion, but at the time it did not permeate all levels of JSOC simultaneously. As with the rest of the U.S. military in Iraq, many task force members at first mistook the war being waged by Zarqawi’s group, soon to be known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, for a Ba’athist “Saddam insurgency,” a Delta source acknowledged. “It really turned out to be [Al Qaeda in Iraq],” he said. “It took us a little bit to figure that out, but once we did, then it was on.”